Unclear on the Concept? Búcha Live Branding Confusion

Alerted to a deal on Búcha Live Kombucha at the Grocery Outlet in Vallejo where bottles of shelf-stable Blood Orange are on sale for 99 cents, we checked the Twitter handle before posting a quick update on the find.

Parent Company

The brand is one of the stable of drinks from the New Age Beverages Co. Their website has two Twitter icons. The one on the left side of the home page generates a Share tweet stating “Healthy All-Natural Nutritious Drinks: Buy Yours Online https://newagebev.com/en-us”. Scrolling down, the bottom of the page has a second icon that takes us to the Twitter account of the parent corporation.

Twitter

Absent a link to the kombucha brand, we searched ‘bucha live’ and found two options. It might have been prudent to choose @mybucha, established in 2010, but they haven’t tweeted since 2014. The @buchalive option was slightly more up-to-date with the most recent tweet from 2016. But only 149 followers?

Instagram

It’s frankly impossible to decide which, if either, of these accounts is the most authentic. However, since Instagram is far more popular than Twitter in the ‘booch world we were encouraged to see the reference to follow Bucha Live at ‘bucha_inc’. There’s just one problem — there’s no such account. The actual account is @drinkbucha. This is, thankfully, cross-referenced from the @newagebev account in a way Twitter was not.

What’s astounding is that New Age Beverages is a publicly traded company whose CEO, Brent Willis, boasts that they are “… the fastest growing beverage company in the world.” If they can achieve this with just around 600 followers for Búcha Live on Instagram and a couple of thousand for the parent company, perhaps this whole social media marketing thing is over-hyped.